Leap of Faith
by skyward.eyes
Summary: I felt exactly like that once when I kissed Caspian's cold, small lips.  Prince Caspian: alternate ending


**Leap of Faith**

_Prince Caspian_: alternate ending

_Something I'd written a long time ago. Something I'd imagined since a long time ago, too, an alternate ending. It makes me glad that I could finally turn it into words. _

_Now: Major edits, simplified, even rearranged in most parts. _

**Summary:**

I felt exactly like that once, several seconds and during the seconds when I kissed Caspian's cold, small lips.

**Timeline:**

Three years after Susan Pevensie left Narnia for good.

**Disclaimer:**

_The Chronicles of Narnia_ is originally written by C.S. Lewis. The movie belongs to its creators.

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><p><strong>Leap of Faith<strong>

I WAS SIXTEEN BACK THEN, in a heavy knit dress trying to get through the roughest winter of my life. It was six months after I went back from Narnia, and I was still thinking about the man I once knew. Nights were long and days were short, because for some reasons I found it harder to operate during daylights, so I slept my days away, waiting for several books to lead me into dozing out, books that were boring for me, books that were too outdated and I could hardly understand. My pick was Homer's _The Odyssey_. It was not particularly boring, the book, but it was a tired leap in time towards a dimension I could never touch, so feeling asleep while reading it would not feel that guilty.

Sometimes I wished the time would flow a bit faster, carrying with it my lost memories I could never retrieve as a grown-up woman. There were times when I woke up, there were beautiful words in my head I could never remember when I'd regained full consciousness. They were there, just there, like ghosts out of a dream. All that was left was the chill on my skin, and its gentle caress on the lace curtain near my bedside. A diary was there on the bedside table, but I hadn't yet opened it for a long time now.

The thought of rereading it scared me off.

Sometimes I wished the book had never existed. The thought scared me because there were dreams hidden in there; dreams, lust, and a transcendent love that had passed 1,300 years of age. A thousand and three hundred years passed in a manner I could never know of.

* * *

><p>TONIGHT WAS LONG. There was no way I could sleep the rest of six hours without feeling like a dead man walking. My skin was dry, and my lips too. To continue living that time meant that I should at least try to get some air by tracing the snow-covered, lights-bathed pavements; the overconfident pavements of New York, the ones filled with frozen faces. Faces washed out by time. I was not one of them, because my face was ravaged, an internal tornado had just swept and blurred its features. It was too dark in my heart to step out towards the light and comfort myself.<p>

* * *

><p>THE SKY WAS A FINE INDIGO ARCH stretching across the metropolis. Jazz was playing across the streets, to the hearts of people who were missing their lovers, people who wished that they were alone, people with big visions, people with narrow minds, people who were away from their homelands, <em>pour les americains, ça<em>. The melody of another world, another dimension. Probably it was Narnia, I don't know. It was playing from the Cair Paravel, the music, it was playing for someone I knew. The Prince with dark brown hair.

I couldn't see his eyes now, I couldn't decode the melody. It was when the female singer started singing with her languorous voice I started to realize that my time was fleeting, too: Time to stay alive, time to breathe in, to breathe out, time to decipher fate and destinies alike, time to stay a Susan Pevensie, time to lose a Susan Pevensie in the mirror.

* * *

><p>I SHOULD'VE WRITTEN TO LUCY, or to Edmund. I heard our cousin was not very pleasant, Eustace. Edmund said he didn't really like him, and he wished he could leave the miserable house soon to join the military. Anything to help him hold his life together. I said: The real world is not a fairytale, face it. Lucy said many things. One day she wrote that she wanted to be beautiful like me. All the time I thought she was prettier than me, she never knew. Her body was petite, but lithe, the tone of her hair was beautiful, only two shades darker than Aslan's strands. Her lips were redder than mine, too, Lucy, I wondered why she wanted to be like me. She looked good in linen summer dresses because she was born so beautiful, she looked good in them because that was her grace. She was so young she had never understood and touched love. She was a sacred flower in the glass case, and every time I read her letters I felt warm inside.<p>

I could've visited Peter, but he was too lost in his works. He was a serious man, Peter, but he was fragile. I hated to bother him. One time I told him my loneliness and he told me the following day that he didn't sleep last night because he was helping me to think on how to conquer the loneliness. He was not someone I should be close to at times like this. I couldn't think of bothering him anymore.

* * *

><p>NEAR THE END OF THE STREET there was a small white-painted house. The windows were wide, and the clear glasses were framed by weathered woods. There were lights, there were several people waiting to get in. A thicker jazz was playing. I walked closer and I smelled something close to a thousand roses, being close to that place reminded me of Basil Hallward's studio in <em>Dorian Gray<em>. It was strange, the house, it looked as if it was sheltered from the metropolis' arrogance and its air of superiority. It was something different, the house. On the door was written on a wrinkled brown paper:

_Benjamin Sosa, first fashion show_

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><p>I SLICED THROUGH THE CROWDS. Once they showed me their annoyed faces, but I kept walking, as if a force was pulling me inside. I saw the show. The silk and chiffon fabrics with asymmetric cuts trimmed with leather or lace, and then knit dresses decorated with pearls, real pearls. The long-legged models wore large bracelets and necklaces made of weathered silver and bronze. The shoes were fine leathers, thigh-high boots with heels high as the skyscrapers. They made me feel like a real woman only by looking at them, or a <em>nouvelle riche<em>. I was still in the midst of the crowds, but I pushed several shoulders to get even closer to the frontmost row, I wanted to see the designer. Benjamin Sosa. I managed to see a slice of dark-brown hair.

Our eyes met, but I didn't know if it was real because of the distance. His gaze was distant, transparent. It was more as if he was looking through me, not at me.

* * *

><p>THE FACE I KNEW. He, Benjamin Sosa, he had Caspian's face. He shook my hand, I looked away.<p>

"Have I seen you somewhere? Or is it me imagining things?" he said with a smile.

Even the smiles were the same.

You are beautiful, he said.

I was very sure that I had seen his face a thousand times before also; in dreams, in this world, and in the world other than this one. When he said that he wanted to meet me after the show, I couldn't even answer him. It was spoken that amidst the loud jazz playing in the background.

The lights were blinding.

* * *

><p>He was wearing a knit cardigan two sizes too big, and a broken white, worn-out shirt underneath. His jeans looked nice on him; it was as if he was born with them attached to his legs. His rough working boots were very attractive, I told him. I bought it when I was a painter in Paris, he said. He crossed his long, thin legs and he spoke. The way I live is very bohemian, sometimes unpredictable.<p>

"I cling on a faith or two. Sometimes not at all." He lit a slim cigarette and tucked his head up as he made his first puff.

We talked. Talked too much. I was selling him my privacy all the time. My attraction towards him was personal, uncontrollable. I thought I knew him, I believed that I had known him for a long, long time. It was fast, the recognition, like a slash of thunder across the night sky. I looked into his eyes, they were dark jewels I'd seen in my teenage dreams a hundred, thousand of times before.

"I'm sure I have seen you," he said, blowing another puff, "Probably in Paris, I don't know."

"We could've been long-lost friends," I said with a smile. He returned it right away.

Jazz was still playing in the background; languorous, sensual, deep, just like our feelings that were talking to ourselves, to our cores.

I could feel the blood rushing. I could hear the rush of its movements. I could feel the absence of indifference in this room.

He was never, never a stranger at all.

* * *

><p>I came back to his studio the next day, and he, without questioning, provided me a small cup of thick coffee. We started talking about pain. He said pains were advertisements, and one would never be able to decipher its real meaning without tasting it through movements of strength and persistence.<p>

Then he started drawing again. I watched him. He told me that he loved being around fabrics and vintage magazines, the smell aroused him, physically and mentally.

"Sometimes the scent makes me feel that I could live for ever," he said, "but I could never escape being twenty-nine. Soon I am going to be thirty, forty, too. When you remind yourself of the fast flow of the time, the inner remarks would soon scare you off."

He was very pure, he was so beautiful it hurts knowing that he, too, would never live forever.

* * *

><p>I sat next to him and watched the sparks, feel the movement inside my head. It was such a long-lost love it hardly took any longer moment to bloom in place. It was already there from the beginning, it was already there, across the timeline 1,300 years long. It was always been there and I blossomed into a real woman.<p>

I asked him where he studied such things, and he said he didn't go to school, because he had no money for that.

* * *

><p>A letter from Lucy was already on the desk when I arrived. I read it for a while and wrote back. I told her that I was fine, and that she was beautiful just the way she was, and she didn't have to worry about anything because she was a marvelous woman. She, Lucy, she always was a marvelous woman.<p>

I told her I had seen Caspian.

* * *

><p>A month passed and the cold hands of winter got replaced by the first, although still chilly, warmth of spring. The pavements were no longer covered in white, and the buildings shone in their full strength with night sky reflected on their surfaces.<p>

After school I visited Sosa, and he always was there. He was always there glued to his working desk, drawing sketches, or elaborating a nicely-created dress. They almost looked as if they were stolen out of a couturier's atelier. When he saw me he smiled, smiled like that as if he was born with that smiling face. The dark circles under his eyes were always sagging, and the spirit in his eyes got more and more faded by every following day, but everything happened really naturally.

* * *

><p>Three weeks later, I received Lucy's reply. I was surprised by how much matured she'd become— I knew it from her writing, probably even more matured than what I thought of her. Her handwriting had changed quite a lot, characters that once were separated from each other, now some of them came in connections. She told me about a change in time, and a slash of coincidence in dimensions. "I doubt it, but it doesn't mean that such is not possible." She said it could be something else, the meeting, or it was something out of one's leap of faith.<p>

The fate that would probably be mine.

In the afternoon I walked to Sosa's place again. He had fallen asleep on his desk. His assistant opened the door for me.

Here was a faith put under the sky, a secret revealed to be left still, still, among the guidance of anonymous angels in my imaginations. It could be moving in full force, the feeling, but the drive was something kind of old. I told you it was something that had gone through 1,300 years, worn and washed out by the rash flow of time. It was never new, this infatuation, it was probably never an infatuation after all. It was just an advertisement, a showdown.

It could be nothing at all.

* * *

><p>WHEN HE WOKE UP he said he had finished the dress for me. Benjamin said that I was the embodiment, the force of beauty that fueled the dress. It was made of broken-white chiffon layers, the dress, and parts of lace and silk corset-cut top. The material was very thin it was barely there. It was only a shade darker from my skin. It was a beautiful dress, more beautiful than me. I told him, he said that I was pretty enough for the dress. Too beautiful for the dress.<p>

"Let me use your belt to decorate it," I said. The old leather belt he was wearing with jeans every time I saw him.

"You can have it, the belt, it's perfect for the dress. _Ce sera plus en plus parfait comme ça, quand c'est vous qui l'avez." _It would become more and more perfect, when that is you who own it.

He kissed my lips. Cold, long kiss. His were frozen, weathered lips. He told me that I'd completed him as a person, helped him complete the core of his creations. He made me looked away and played with my hair; it was a dream that was coming true, a dream of my younger days. I felt exactly like that once, several seconds and during the seconds when I kissed Caspian's cold, small lips.

* * *

><p>I NEVER TOLD SOSA ABOUT NARNIA, I never did. Whenever I started thinking to tell him I couldn't help but wonder and got my mind split in two realms, one behind the mirror and the one before the mirror.<p>

I had grown older. Older, no Narnia, and no turning back.

I was back for good. For good.

* * *

><p>SEASONS CHANGED AND A PART OF ME REMAINED UNCHANGED; a story that would never be, could never be, and would never be present anymore. It was a wind blowing from the past, blowing backward; washing away memories, cleansing pains. Something about infatuation was never really a wrongdoing; it was something colonial; a straight trust to the heart, a confusion, a rumor. Day by day I visited him, and he slowly filled me with a strange warmth, but through the same warmth I came to a conclusion that he was not the man 1,300 years younger than me to whom I first fallen in love with. Probably it was just a play of time, after all, or a revoked tale from a modern day. A day with brand-new stars.<p>

It was a thought faraway, a feeling remained unspoken of, it was a crossroad between faiths, I didn't know. I could stay and wait several years later, I could grow up gracefully; I could keep on learning; challenging facts and creating paradoxes.

But I just wanted to be alive. Alive, accepting the bleeding.

The mute hands of time and the leap of faith: Caspian remained as a secret inside me. A secret that would bloom just like Sosa's creations. It would take flight, the secret, and one day it would leave the core with me.

Safe with me.

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><p>December 21— December 25, 2010<p>

Edited: June 28, 2011


End file.
